Breathing Time

So, finally, after almost a month, I seem to have a few clear days this week. Including today. None of the usual mad scramble going from one meeting to another and generally loping off to Delhi for a day and Hyderabad for another. Of course, it did feel like I was so cool & important to be so busy and all but really, too damn tiring. I was getting particularly irritated that I could not get the time to exercise. I think that was the most important thing. Close on the heels comes the fact that I did not have enough time on the good ol' internet. That sucked majorly. Anyway, here we are today, reasonably free.

Here is what happened to me last night. We went home, usual 6:30 types. Thankfully there were enough vegetables in the fridge, the Crossword Store sale had been attended to, no phone calls needed to be made, bills of the month were paid off, and, I did not have oodles of office work to do. So, I could potentially have chilled out with a cup of coffee, reading the most sentient of papers, the Mumbai Mirror, and if the mood bubbled, worked on the Sudoku and Kakuro and Mindbender and Crossword. But, higher powers, fate, whatever, had other things in store.

The maid, my super loyal lady in waiting, had made away with all the newspapers in the house, including the stuff delivered just that morning. This when she had come late and I had literally pushed her out the door cause I had to leave early, she did not clean the bathrooms but found time to wrap up the newspapers and cart them off. Curse her. So, no Sudoku. Not a single one. No Kakuro either.

The neighbour friend of child was MIA. Don't know where she had gone, was not keen to find out. Would have involved getting out of the door, ringing doorbell and what not. Did not have it in me. Child was also tired & not so very keen on playing, at least she did not pester me about finding her friend. So we started off reading the new Magic Pot magazine (all the while thinking wistfully about Mumbai Mirror & Bombay Times). The usual colouring (she seems to hate colouring by the way, perhaps if I had more energy I would be worried about it), join the dots, find missing words and so on.

Half an hour of this and I was tired. The animal stories were getting on my nerves. So I said to the child, why don't we make our own story? yeah, I know, I am very original that way. I am probably the very first mother in the whole entire civilised world who thought of such a thing. :-)

Promptly, very promptly, too promptly, the monster child comes up with one about Noddy & Pooh and going exploring, and honey. For some reason the colour Yellow features a lot. I got super enthu. Dragged out my special yellow coloured paper and drew Noddy and the others (as in, violated copyright and copied shamelessly from Disney & Blyton). Requested that she colour them. She mussed it up immediately. So I drew it again and we hung out and batted ideas off each other about how to do it, and finally came up with a four page book with a story called 'Noddy goes exploring' Not a single drawing is original, and possibly (I don't know for sure), the whole premise and story-line are borrowed heavily from previous ones, but hey! We made our own story book! So what if I am thirty-three years old, and not that great at drawing, I still love crayons.

I tell you its quite a treat. I am thinking next step find a publisher, a professional illustrator, and stuff like that. But wait, who was that kid at Harvard that got totally messed up after a huge advance for her first book. Oh yeah! Maybe THAT is the lesson my girl has to be taught from this episode, that only the REALLY original ideas are worth publishing. Borrowing characters from popular (or even unpopular, for that matter) published works is trouble with a capital T.